In Case of Emergency, Make Burrito Bison 3

The Making of Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre

TL;DR

• Our previous game, Toto Temple Deluxe, didn’t sell as expected
• We decided to make a new Burrito Bison to get back on our feet financially
• We added lots of new features to improve on the 2 previous games
• We had to adapt the BB formula to the F2P mobile market
• The mobile release has been a success so far
• Some numbers

If you’ve been living under a rock (or if you don’t know about us, which would be strange because we’re super famous, really) you might have missed that in November 2016 we released the 3rd game in the Burrito Bison series, Burrito Bison: Launcha Libre, for web, iOS and Android.

If you’re unfamiliar with Burrito Bison, it’s a simple and supposedly addicting game about Mexican launchadores (launching + luchadores) wrestling gummy bears. It’s a classic launching game, like any you’ve probably played in your browser a couple years ago, but on steroids.

The Burrito Bison games are probably our most famous games to date, just above Knightmare Tower. They all went pretty viral back in our Flash days (we’re talking dozens of millions of plays). You might be thinking “if it’s your most popular franchise, why did you wait 4+ years to make another one?” That’s actually a very good question!

Why wait 4 years before cashing in on that success?

Busy Beast

The direct answer to that is probably that a bunch of opportunities led us to work on other things after releasing Burrito Bison Revenge (BBR) in 2012. Here’s a quick list of what we did since.

• Burrito Bison Revenge on Kongregate
• Knightmare Tower on Kongregate
• Flippin Dead on Kongregate
• Knightmare Tower on Ouya/iOS/Android/Steam
• Toto Temple Deluxe on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and Steam
• Right Click to Necromance on Kongregate

As you can see, apart from Toto Temple Deluxe and a bunch of jam games, we haven’t release any new games. It’s mostly just ports of our old games.

Adventurous Beast

The other, less obvious answer to that brilliant question is that we like to create new things and experiment with new ideas. Making the same game over and over gets pretty boring. We also felt that there wasn’t much we could add to the Burrito Bison experience to justify making another one.

The ugly truth

Let’s be honest for a second. The truth is that we did it for the money. We can hear you judging us. You’re probably thinking “well of course you did it for the money, you run a business and you need to eat too”, right?

Toto Temple Deluxe’s financial failure

It might be a surprise to you, but Toto Temple Deluxe didn’t sell that much. The game is good, fun and everything, but it’s local-multiplayer only, and these are extremely hard to sell. Long story short, it was a pretty serious situation that nearly kicked us out of business. We were out of money and we needed a way to get back on our feet quick.

Evaluating options

We considered a Kickstarter campaign, but it would take months to build a prototype and run the campaign. We also looked at the Canadian Media Funds (CMF), but the application process is long and uncertain. A bank loan was considered a last resort.

The Solution

We remembered that Burrito Bison Revenge won the "Best Game on Kongregate Ever" contest. We decided to ask Kongregate if they wanted to fund the development of a new Burrito Bison game through their Launchpad program. It was perfect because the IP was popular, the risk was low, and we already knew what made the game fun. We got the deal, and we were saved.

Making the best BB we can, no matter what

Even if making a new Burrito Bison game wasn’t our first choice, we still wanted to make it the best in the series. We still care about the quality of our games, and we would never release a game we’re not proud of. We used the same process we used to make the first two games: taking something we like and finding what could be done better.